Terrible Gamefaqs Mods Censor Views, Defend Deserter


Let it never be said that TaiIs82 provokes conflict with Gamefaqs or hypes up stories just to get attention. In truth, we would love to walk away from this blog and be left alone. For that to happen, corrupt Gamefaqs mods need to stop their shallow games. But until then, this will remain one of the few places where censored users have the opportunity to defend themselves - and it's always in defense, from absurd moderator attacks. We even held off from some more recent criticism. But with the attacks that have just occurred, we can do so no longer. It is imperative that we defend ourselves from the mods' most recent hate campaign.

Since users are asking for details, the incident seems to be a repeat of last July 4 - when a huge batch of users were suspended by the site and left in limbo for over a week. CE keeps a running list of warned/suspended users, and there's been a similar surge - the main difference this time is that the admin wasn't off for over a week this time, and could respond more quickly.

This list is certainly useful, but at the same time it raises some obvious questions. Who is tracking all these users and watching for them to be warned/suspended? (And there are indeed some people who go beyond just informing, and root for more). We maintain that there is a group of biased individuals who do not come to the board to contribute, but to destroy - to chill discourse and silence others. A few are well-known to longtime readers of this blog, such as the multiple individuals on Hellhole who openly said that they marked EVERY message by yours truly, just because they didn't like the account. In the past, groups like Snack Attack (formed to mass-mark and censor other people) used to be frowned upon - and were even moderated themselves for making false reports - but apparently the idea continues to this day. Despite losing in a big way, these blind squirrels will find a nut sometime. What do we mean by that? Two things.

Either mods are gullible and fall for the complaints of The Aggrieved, or worse - they are actively working with them to silence people they disagree with. From our experience, both of these factors are at play. There can be 1,000 phony complaints to mods, and all it takes to hit the targeted user is to have 1 get through, either because of a mod who can't read or a mod who is in on it too and goes looking for any reason to damage the targeted account.

My personal favorite moderation happened a few months ago, when I had a message taken down because the moderator disagreed with the topic title (the guy who actually made that topic, and therefore the topic itself, remains up for all time in the site archive). First, for anyone to get "offended" at a title because it said the name of a bill in parliament with an "LOL" attached to the end, is one of the stupidest grounds for moderation I've ever seen. No one is getting offended at that in good faith. But second, assume it was something serious. Assume the title was "Hitler was right, kill all the Jews." If I had posted in that topic and said "That's a disgusting and repugnant view," Gamefaqs mods are so incompetent that they would've punished me instead of the guy who made the topic I'm posting under, because some of them are so bad at it to the point where they don't even bother to read what they're censoring.

That's pretty terrible on its own. But, it goes further than that.

It's no secret to any Hellhole follower that the mods there hold personal grudges - in fact, it's no secret to anyone who has an interaction to these bad apples on any board. They have it in for certain users, and if someone doesn't mark a message they will moderate it directly. RaptorLC is a prime example of this (more on him later). Arbitrary topic locks, arbitrary moderations if he decides you're annoying him...or if he's just bored with the topic.

But before I rant on longer, let's get to the moderations. Enter Warning #1 from about a month ago. On the Politics board, someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to make a topic asking if we should quarantine people with HIV. My response was that we shouldn't do that and it was not a realistic policy. Are we good? Of course not. You see, I was still insensitive because I didn't rule out a quarantine waaaay in the past when it WAS realistic and would've meant stopping half a dozen people at the border. In other words, they warned me because I opposed a quarantine, but didn't oppose it enough.

Why it is any of their business to enforce their personal opinions on everyone is beyond me. But it gets more ridiculous: moderator Lord_of_Beefdip, whose opinions are as long as they are wrong, stepped in to quote me and tell me personally that I am a threat to human rights. Clearly someone this biased and out of it should not be moderating their opinions - at the very least, have someone else look at it. But not only did Beefdip fail to contain his temper, by posting he indicated that he had been through that topic and read the other messages within - none of which he had a problem with. Out of over 60 messages, mine and mine alone was singled out and moderated.

Let's look at what some of the other posts said: first, there's the guy who made the topic itself, asking to quarantine thousands of people today. Don't you think that any mod looking at that topic would've started there? But not a peep from Beefdip.

There were some additional people who agreed with the topic title. No moderations there.

There was a guy who said we should go even further and quarantine "all stupid people." That remained up, too.

There was the guy who said we should treat everyone who has an STD as if they were a bioterrorist. Beefdip was nowhere to be found.

No, out of over 60 posts, Beefdip quoted mine personally - again, "quoting a violation" which was a longstanding site rule not to do, but of course is never enforced on mods or their friends (even as they'll mod me because of some other guy's topic title? Riddle me that).

In fact, mine was the only message that was taken down in that entire topic - until Beefdip finally nuked it to cover his tracks, once I pointed out on CE how biased, targeted and inconsistent the moderations were, along with his mistreatment of me. The train wreck that had unfolded - personally singling me out, modding just me, lying about my position while ignoring multiple messages that actually wanted a quarantine, or worse - all this has no other explanation but mod bias.

By the way, since Beefdip said my opinion was a threat to human rights, I tried that line out in part of my dispute and asked mods not to be "human rights violators" for undermining my free speech. You can guess how that turned out. Lead mod stuck with their guy.

And so we make our way to warning #2, which is the title of this blog post, and which almost would've been a blog entry on its own a few weeks ago considering how awful it was. We don't go out of our way to complain here, but since the mods continue to harass and attack on a daily basis, it's only right for us to defend ourselves.

Warning #2 was for saying that I do not respect deserters like Bergdahl - this was in response to someone who (sarcastically) said that everybody should be respected no matter what, as long as they were in the military for at least a day.

Let's not dwell on the politics for too long, but just keep this in mind: as I mentioned in that topic and elsewhere, Bergdahl is someone who admitted his own guilt and, right up to the end of last month, was still saying that the Taliban treated him better than the US.

The official reason for my moderation was that I could offend someone by "disrespecting the troops."

...To anyone who knows even a speck of what goes on at the Politics board, when in the hell has anyone ever been moderated for that? Also, that wasn't what I was doing at all. The guy was a self-admitted deserter who was dishonorably discharged. Why does Gamefaqs feel compelled to tell me that I'd better respect him, or get censored?

So that night, I took a tally of the other opinions that remained up (and apparently don't offend the mods), including:

- Multiple people who also used my exact same terminology and said that they have zero respect for anyone who voted for Trump, including (and especially) Democrats who had voted for Obama 2 times
- Multiple people who praised an attacker who broke Rand Paul's ribs
- Put a quarantine wall around the entire midwest to punish them for having GOP in their states
- Abraham Lincoln was the worst president ever and he oppressed the Confederate south

These are all opinions that would normally fall under the offensive rule - if we were using my moderations as a baseline. The difference between lovers of free speech and The Offended is that the former act like adults and can turn the other cheek, debate and defeat offensive views on their own. The latter can only shriek like a child and claim they're offended.

There is nothing that stops Gamefaqs mods from debating like anyone else - if Beefdip, for example, had just disagreed with me and left it at that, I'd still think he was incorrect but I wouldn't view him as a power-abusing ass. There is absolutely no reason to mod people based off one's personal political opinion and what they personally like or dislike - or rather, WHO they personally dislike (Beefdip no doubt would disagree with those other quarantine remarks, but he decided to target me exclusively). Forget the actual content of the message. The #1 thing that offends them is your username.

We here at GUAC hope that the upcoming, but seemingly stalled proposals to reform the moderation system address this problem. We'd prefer to see more loosening of the rules, but at the very least, be consistent. Right now, "offensive" moderations have no definition and are entirely up to the personal feelings of the mod involved - which, as we saw last July 4, can quickly lead to mass-suspensions if the person involved is abusive or easily triggered.

But let's finally get to today.

This one's another doozy because it popped up on my screen 2-3 minutes after I had posted it, right before I went to sleep last night. I couldn't log out before it showed up, it was that fast. And it wasn't a one-liner; it was towards the upper character limit (basically my final comments that night to 3 people) covering everything from abortion to the Alabama election to Hulk Hogan.

I want you to imagine all those times mods said they were super-busy, MIASU, or needed a lot more time to respond to your disputes, feedback, whatever. Think about all the times they weren't there. Now let's think about what happened here: in the span of 2-3 minutes, this message went from queue to mod review to moderation. There was hardly enough time to read the message, let alone by two or more people, let alone review it properly. That in itself is a big red flag. Look how quickly they're here, and suddenly how fast they act, when it's all to screw you over.

Did they even read the thing? Well, considering how that mod from above, who got offended at "LOL," couldn't tell the difference between my message and the TC's title, I have my doubts. But here's my theory...

After I got that moderation, I acted quickly as well - bringing up the profile pages of our Gamefaqs moderators. Since mods like to hide behind a cloak of anonymity in all their decisions and dispute responses, my approach was one of the few ways to whittle down who was actually responsible. Turns out at that time of night, RaptorLC was the only mod to register recent activity within the past hour. Suddenly things began to make more sense.

I propose that nobody saw that message, nobody got "offended," nobody marked it in that narrow timeframe. Two people weren't involved, just one. And Raptor fits the bill perfectly: any time he gets into one of his moods on Hellhole, he closes the topic or moderates the user directly, sometimes adding some message about how their comment annoyed him. Raptor also has the motive against me, as I've called out these tactics of his before.

Raptor saw my most recent message, got annoyed with my opinion, had a kneejerk response and that was that.

Granted, this is a theory because Gamefaqs intentionally makes it hard to know mod actions (which does wonders for transparency and clamping down on abuse, he said with an eyeroll). But it's backed up with some evidence, as much as account activity would let one deduce, and the following message definitely applies anyway for the stuff that he openly pulls on Hellhole.

RaptorLC: it's time for you to grow up. Stop being such a keyboard warrior coward.

The Things That Will (And Will Not) Get You Punished on GameFAQs

FINALLY - After ten days of delay, the full details behind the temporary suspension of Yours Truly are now known. The process itself took a full seventeen days to work out - compared to the site's own internal target of 24 hours, or 1 business day. Excellent job! You would think that a system that seems to be so overburdened would not waste additional time targeting personal opinions. Reports of long-delayed mod responses to disputes appear more common than ever. We suppose that when it comes to moderations, the staff has been biting off more than it can chew.

Apologies in advance to our moderator friends who rely on the pictures to follow along - after the extremely long wait, we barely had enough time to see the other moderations on record before they disappeared entirely. If you're unfamiliar with this process, it's due to a bad way that the system is set up - it whites other board functionality entirely, meaning users cannot even see any of their additional moderated messages or accusations against them until the admin finally shows up ten days later. But we eventually got the text! So here's the rundown:

Message 1!

"Do LGBT groups endorse candidates? "Second-class citizens" should have the same rights. This is a free speech issue."

This message is in response to a topic about rescinding the Johnson Amendment, which has not really ever been enforced in practice. Is this not a message in support of equality? Is it not the definition of equality to let any group endorse whoever they want? We thought so too. But this is the kind of message that will get you suspended on Gamefaqs!

The "second-class citizens" reference - follow me on this - is clearly in quotes so as to mock the concept, not literally call anyone a second-class citizen. This is obvious to anyone with simple reading comprehension, but these are Gamefaqs mods we're talking about.

As usual, you can see the entire message within the topic because our stalker quoted the "dangerous," suspension-worthy message without any consequences. (See what I did there, mods? "Dangerous" in this context is not to be taken literally...nevermind, you'll catch on). Yes, even though quoting a violation is against the terms of use, you will never see this actually enforced. This approach only confirms the notion that messages are taken down solely to punish the original user for their views, because it's not treated like a violation at all when anyone else quotes it. That's because it's usually not a violation in the first place.

Message 2!

We all know why they're there. It's not talent. Europe is in decline.

This one was declared offensive - and it's a twofer! Not only did I say that Europe was in decline, I said that their leaders were not elected for talent and were instead chosen to be identity politics placeholders. We think the current failures of the continent speak for themselves, don't you? Well, we guess that'll have to do on Gamefaqs, because they'll punish you if you try to speak for it.

As someone who has privilege though, owning an entire small blog on the internet, maybe it is appropriate to feel sorry for these European leaders. The poor, marginalized, persecuted, discriminated politicians who only get to run entire countries (into the ground). Meanwhile here I am, not even allowed to make a negative statement against them on an internet message board lest it offend the precious feelings of LGBT activists. They sure have a tough life. Man do I have it easy.

And again, you can see the message in full because it was quoted once more, and mods are nothing if not inconsistent. We mentioned last time about the message from a month prior to all this, where Yours Truly got in trouble not for quoting someone, but just for posting in a topic where the topic title was something the mod disagreed with...as the topic itself remained up. So really, nobody can say this is just because the mods try their best and it's simply a massive coincidence that only our messages get taken down every time. They can sure seem to find and remove quotes when it's their least favorite users, including for BS reasons like "you posted in the wrong topic."

By the way, before we ramble further, it's worth another reminder that it won't hurt our feelings if moderators disagree with any of these opinions, and want to debate them on the Politics board like normal people. But to say that these messages are a high priority for censorship that need to be removed from the boards within half an hour? Wow. Would any moderators like some money? I will pay you to get a life.

All said and done, that's 15 karma lost. Here's where the stream dried up for a few days, as we took a little break from the site and planned to restart this wonderful blog. But we aren't done just yet!

Upon lurking and hearing that suspensions dropped left and right over the July 4 weekend, we began to wonder who was covering for the usual mods that holiday weekend and why they were doing such a terrible job. The best thing to do would be to ask Twitter's favorite lead mod, Error1355!

...It went about as well as we thought it would. Error responded with random beeping noises. Shortly afterwards - wouldn't you know - another three messages were moderated from many days earlier. A totally unknown moderator with perfect timing, who will remain nameless, decided to go through active message history and remove additional opinions he disliked! All three ended up being no karma loss, which is an odd thing to do when someone's in an active suspension. Indications that the "violations" within were so flimsy, they would normally not be taken down - but why not add to the violation count just to make the number appear bigger and suggest harsher treatment?

Message 3!

"Charter schools are better with turnover and constant reform, constant improvement and innovation, much like democracy. Meanwhile the public schools get more money and stagnate, because corrupt unions retain corrupt workers and make them unfireable. The 19th century top-down public union model has failed."

Hot damn! The eyes of impressionable 13 year olds everywhere were spared. What would we have done without swift moderator action?

We are to believe that these are messages the userbase marks, and not mods combing through one's history for violations. But either way, honestly I don't know which way is sadder.

Message 4!

"Sandra Bland would still be around today if she valued her own life. Everybody here did."

This is probably the nicest way I could've put it, hence the nkl.

Message 5!

The whole thing's here - all you need to know is that no-go zones are not a PC term.

Long story short, don't ever suggest that Europe is in decline on Gamefaqs. This part has gone on long enough. As for what you CAN say, more after the page break!

Tales from CE Return - And The Mods Strike Back

More users have noticed that the always trigger-happy moderators of Gamefaqs have stepped up their game recently, even for them, a quick scan of Current Events shows.

"Im seeing lots of topics currently about mods going crazy. jumping on every opportunity to mod posts. So who is this guy? Is he newly recruited?" -Cobra1010

"the mods have been a little mod crazy as of late...I have gotten modded more in the last 2 weeks then last 2 months." -Dustin1280

^"Same here. They jump at every chance to mod you. In the 10 years i've been using gamefaqs, iv probably been modded like 10-15 times total. But been modded 2 times in the last 2 weeks. This place has really become a s*** hole...I found a better place to discuss gaming and other stuff." -Cobra1010

"Yeah they're on a f***ing high horse right now" -DezCaughtIt

"Alright which one of you mods has been doing all these unjustified moderations the past few days. Get your ass in here and explain yourself" -Axiom

"I was modded yesterday for what seemed like a year or so with no moderations. These mods are crazy, man." -Volkswagen_Bros

"I had a totally clean mod history and got warned...This is like shooting someone for their first shoplifting offense. I called a mod immature a few hours ago. I suspect that's why I was targeted" -Tezlok

"I got a 3 KL for laughing at an offensive joke without even quoting it and then a mod responded with "Laughing at a joke perpetuates its offensiveness" as justification for the modding. Someone else was modded for using twink because it's a 'slur'...Did Allen send out a memo to mods telling them to be even more uptight than usual or something"-Axiom

"I once got modded just for saying that what I wanted to say would get me modded." -Gamer99z

"The mods on this website dont really care about the users on this website. They use their mod role as a form of entertainment." -angermngment101

"I had a 16 year old, clean history acc get instabanned for posting a joke spoiler." -Ilishe

"I almost got banned for posting a nonsense spoiler like Dumbledore kills Anakin. People here go frothing at the mouth apes*** over the possibility of getting spoiled, the mods don't even want to handle it. I don't get it." -Rexdragon125

"I got a 3KL for quoting a link to Trump's twitter." -DezCaughtIt

"i got warned last week for referencing the body-slamming incident with Greg Gianforte and a reporter. f***ing conservatroll mods lol." -DuranOfForcena

"I haven't been modded since I stopped posting in Islam or transgender topics. There's a mod or two who are overly sensitive about that s*** and will clean history 3KL all day long if you even tastefully speak out about either one, or use the wrong pronoun. That still pisses me off." -voldothegr8

^"they really need to name and shame that loser" -ModLogic

"Mmhm, I got my first moderation the other day for posting an image comparing the metric system to the imperial system. Apparently suggesting the imperial system is inferior is 'offensive'." -Joelypoely

"the mods are crazy" -ManLink4321

"This is why we need some kind of mod transparency, and no it wouldn't cause witchhunts. It would cause justified hunts." -voldothegr8

"That feel when you havnt reached your moderation quota this week...So you look at your s***list and just pick a post at random. God the mods on this site arent very good" -Rika_Furude

Meanwhile, within the topic "use 1 word to define gamefaqs moderators" the top results are "inconsistent" and "embarrassment," while "bad," "scourge," "lol," and "garbage" also registered. In fairness, though, one guy thought they were friendly.

Update on the Politics Situation

We at GUAC have now counted at least four users suspended since last Friday, with one account even suspended while we were writing a PM to him. That wasn't very nice!

Although by actual numbers, Euroknight has seen the most suspensions in the past week. He sent us a fine rap sheet of all the things that can get you in hot water - messages such as "a few less gender studies majors," "Why do Democrats need safe spaces?" praising a photo of Trump posing with a gay teacher, and linking to a Project Veritas video.

http://imgur.com/a/VFPAU

We've reached out on Twitter to both Gamefaqs and Error1355 about the recent suspension spree from the moderators, and Gamefaqs itself has naturally not responded (we don't think they've kept up on social media since Krystal was sacked). Error, however, was very kind to respond with random beeping noises, later calling this and all the accounts quoted above "crazies."

It is now Wednesday, and none of the suspended accounts from last Friday have been addressed - despite the one day decision policy. Although the higher-ups may be behind on things, Error and the mods have let us know that we certainly won't be neglected on their end. Shortly after contacting Error on Twitter, this writer received an additional three moderations.

Don't Call a Klansman a Klansman

In another one of those Great Moments in Moderator Decisions, Politics board user Welcommatt has been warned after linking to a story about Confederate flag and klan supporters. His board crime was to call the participants "paranoid klansmen" - and this likely fell under the so-called antagonistic label, by a mod who obviously didn't read the story.

The user then posted a second topic for the story, without the "offensive" comment attached, and it was taken down again. This time he got warned after posting the same "offensive" article twice.

Not a great weekend for Gamefaqs.

While we were reaching out to Error about the other suspensions, we also raised that second topic while it was still up and questioned the idea that it was a violation. The second topic was deleted shortly afterwards. Our apologies if this tweet brought on the unwanted attention of anti-speech manchildren.

GameFAQs Mods SUCK! (the blog is back, baby!)

Welcome back to Gamefaqs Users Against Censorship! If this is your first time here, you may have come upon this blog because you've had a bad time on the Gamefaqs boards - like many of us - and you're asking, are the mods really that bad? (Yes). If you're a veteran, you know exactly what we're talking about. So let's get down to business!

Why The Return?

As a longtime board member and even longer visitor to the site, this author has seen his fair share of abusive and incompetent behavior from the Gamefaqs moderation "staff" (really, volunteers with nothing better to do...you get what you pay for). Many years ago we began keeping a list of all the so-called violations of the Terms - in our case, moderations on the Politics board since the easily-triggered could not handle the presence of different opinions. The blog itself went up a few years ago and took off in a big way - as big as it can get within the site community, that is. Turns out that whether it was Current Events, Hellhole or anywhere else, the moderators were up to their tricks wherever they could mod. Offsite, there were even more blogs and topics out there complaining about how terrible the mods at Gamefaqs were. All in all, it seems to be a well-known issue.

But something changed after the mostly-disastrous era of one-time, then canned community manager Krystal109: the mods saw a significant amount of turnover. Some notoriously corrupt mods were removed. Complaints from CE began to go down. The Gamefaqs user base overall continued to grow up, and it was assumed that the moderators had grown too. Sadly, this was not the case.

We here at GameFAQs Users Against Censorship saw no reason to continue sinking time on long writeups when there was no reason to complain, no reason to hold grudges or sink into false sensationalism just to keep it going and get views. For their part the moderators FINALLY began to overturn messages, and even APOLOGIZED for the original moderation(s). It seemed like the beginning of a new era of free speech on the site. It didn't last.

A man can only take so much until he stands up for himself. The last straw was over the July 4th weekend, ironically during a time when most people celebrate free expression. Gamefaqs mods decided to spend their Friday and Saturday nights clamping down on accounts - with a rash of suspensions set to last for much of the week, if not longer.

Power will always be abused unless there is pushback, so this blog is here to push back. As always, we welcome contributions and story tips from users and mods alike. Send it to Tails82! We're going to have fun with this thing.

And now for the latest saga!

We Did It